Reception and Legacy

No Christian writer has been read, fought over, and re-read more than Paul. From the second century, when Marcion tried to claim him for a truncated gospel and the Church reclaimed him for the whole, through the patristic commentators, the Augustinian and Latin appropriation, the Reformation’s re-centering of justification, to the modern critical recovery — the history of reading Paul is in large part the history of Christian theology itself. This file traces that reception and the continuous Orthodox reading that runs through it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Early Contest: Marcion and the Apostolic Fathers

Paul’s letters were authoritative in the Church from the first. The Apostolic Fathers quote and echo him constantly: Clement of Rome cites him to the Corinthians (1 Clement 47, recalling Paul’s own letter to them), Ignatius of Antioch writes in saturated Pauline language, and Polycarp of Smyrna’s Epistle to the Philippians is so woven from Pauline phrases that it is itself a witness to the early circulation and authority of the corpus (Polycarp, Philippians 3, invoking “the blessed and glorious Paul”; see St. Polycarp of Smyrna and St. Ignatius of Antioch).

The first great crisis over Paul came with Marcion (c. 140), who made a truncated collection of ten Pauline letters (excluding the Pastorals), together with an edited Gospel of Luke, the entire canon of his sect — reading Paul as the apostle of a gospel of pure grace set against the God and Law of the Old Testament, which Marcion rejected. The Church’s response, in Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others, was decisive: Paul was reclaimed for the whole Church and the whole Scripture, read in continuity with the Law and the Prophets and with the other apostles, against Marcion’s mutilation (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3; Tertullian, Against Marcion 5; see St. Irenaeus of Lyons). The episode left a permanent lesson: Paul must be read within the rule of faith and the full canon, never as a lone authority against the tradition — a principle the Orthodox reading has kept ever since (Wiles, The Divine Apostle, 1967).

The Patristic Recovery and the Greek East

The Fathers reclaimed Paul not only against Marcion but as the common possession of the Church’s exegesis. Origen’s Commentary on Romans, the Cappadocians’ use of Paul in their dogmatic and ascetic theology, the Antiochene commentaries of Theodore and Theodoret, and above all the homilies of John Chrysostom built the Eastern reading of Paul — participatory, deifying, pastoral, holding grace and freedom together in synergy (see The Eastern Reading of Paul and Chrysostom and the Apostle). This reading was transmitted through the catenae, the Byzantine commentators (Oecumenius, Theophylact), and the systematizing of John of Damascus, and remains the Orthodox lens on the apostle to this day (Wiles, The Divine Apostle, 1967).

Augustine and the Latin West

In the Latin West, Paul’s influence took a distinctive and momentous turn through Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine’s reading of Romans — above all Romans 5, 7, and 9 — shaped his doctrines of original sin, the bondage and liberation of the will, prevenient grace, and predestination, especially in the course of his controversy with Pelagius over the necessity and priority of grace. Augustine’s Paul became the foundation of Western soteriology for a thousand years, and the questions he framed — grace and free will, nature and grace, the guilt inherited from Adam — set the agenda of Latin theology. The Eastern tradition, reading the same Paul through Chrysostom and the Greek Fathers, developed these themes differently, with a lighter stress on inherited guilt and a stronger stress on synergy and deification — a difference of emphasis, stated without polemic, that is treated in Grace and Righteousness (per METHODOLOGY §4).

The Medieval and Reformation Reorientations

In the Latin Middle Ages Paul was read through Augustine and the schoolmen; the great commentaries of the period (Aquinas among them) expounded the epistles within the developing scholastic synthesis. The decisive modern reorientation came with the Reformation: Martin Luther’s reading of Romans and Galatians — justification by faith alone, the bondage of the will, law and gospel — placed Paul, and a particular interpretation of his doctrine of justification, at the very center of Western Christianity and of the controversies that divided it. The Reformation’s Paul, read through the lens of an “introspective conscience” anxious for a gracious God, dominated Protestant exegesis for centuries — until the twentieth century challenged precisely that lens (Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 1976; see Grace and Righteousness). The Orthodox East stood outside these Western controversies, continuing to read Paul through the Fathers.

The Modern Critical and Theological Recovery

Modern scholarship transformed the study of Paul again. The nineteenth-century Tübingen school (F. C. Baur) set Pauline and Petrine “tendencies” against each other; the history-of-religions school sought the roots of Paul’s thought in the mystery cults; the twentieth century saw the rediscovery of Paul’s apocalyptic and Jewish matrix, Albert Schweitzer’s stress on “being in Christ” as the center, Rudolf Bultmann’s existential interpretation, and the great mid-century debates. Then came Krister Stendahl’s dismantling of the “introspective conscience” reading and E. P. Sanders’s recasting of Paul’s relation to Judaism, launching the “New Perspective” (Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977; see Critical Questions). Through all of this the participatory and union-with-Christ reading — long native to the Greek Fathers — has steadily regained prominence, and a “Finnish school” and others have brought Orthodox theosis-categories into the modern conversation about Paul and salvation.

The Orthodox Reading Throughout

Across all these reorientations the Orthodox Church has read Paul with remarkable continuity: as apostle and saint, inspired author of canonical Scripture, preacher of the gospel of grace and the new creation, and herald of the deifying union with the risen Christ — read always within the communion of the Fathers and the rule of faith, never as a lone authority and never against the tradition (see The Eastern Reading of Paul). The persecutor made apostle (see Persecutor to Apostle) remains, in the Orthodox memory, the chief Apostle Paul, the teacher of the nations, whose letters the Church reads at her altars and whose feast she keeps with Peter on June 29 (see Veneration and the Feast). The history of reading Paul is, in the end, the history of the Church learning and re-learning the gospel from her greatest letter-writer — and the Orthodox tradition holds that the Fathers, above all Chrysostom, heard him truest.

References

Wiles, Maurice F. The Divine Apostle: The Interpretation of St Paul’s Epistles in the Early Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
Tertullian. Against Marcion 5. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3.
Stendahl, Krister. Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.
Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.
Polycarp of Smyrna. Epistle to the Philippians. Trans. in Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.